Every Saturday, we take a look at notable and interesting Tabletop campaigns ending in the next week. We focus on RPG settings & adventures, accessories, and medium-heavy board games with interesting themes.

RPGs

Roslof Keep and the Folio are a lengthy 5th Edition / 1st Edition series by Scott Taylor (doing business as the Art of the Genre). He’s on his 45th Kickstarter! As with previous entries, these books have high-production value with great art and maps. This adventure is a continuation of the previous, and is designed for level 11 characters.

This is a Space Opera RPG that uses the “Horizon” (2D10) system. It’s definitely a story-centric framework, but with just a bit of crunch for resolving conflicts. You can check out the quickstart rules for free on DriveThru RPG.

Spire is a unique RPG we backed last year. It’s a story-centric system that revolves around politics, culture-clash, and rebelling against authority. In it, you play a Dark Elf, subjugated into service by the ruling class. Using the skills you learned in life, you run with a team of other rebels for a variety of mission-types to attempt to enact change in the world of Spire.This sourcebook expands the system with a two new classes, five new scenarios, and a lot more background info on the Strata parts of the Spire.

This is a sourcebook for D&D that let’s you add a detailed ancient kingdom of sentient snakes to your campaign world. The artwork is great and the creators are passionate. If you’re into this kind of source material, it’s definitely worth a look.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Savage Worlds is a popular indie setting-neutral RPG system that has official material for steampunk, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, and fantasy settings. This new edition of the RPG is a bit light on details, but the “Adventure Edition” promises faster gameplay.

Invisible Sun is a reprint of a “Surreal Fantasy” RPG by popular RPG writer Monte Cook. The interesting hook in this game are “side-scenes.” These are mini scenarios constructed by the players when they are away from the table (and away from the GameMaster), which allow the game to continue to develop even when you aren’t actively playing. This seems like a great system with very creative and active players that want to play more than they are physically able.

RPG Accessories

There’s something I really like about the elegant water color illustrations in this magic item set. This campaign is for a new set of 52 magic items. The backs of the cards are blank, so they can be used in any system. These make for a great addition to the Pathfinder Magic Item cards, as well the newly-released 5th edition magic item cards. Handing a player a magic item card is a pretty rewarding experience. One deck is $20, to get the previous deck as well it’s $40.

Miniatures

Midlam Miniatures consistently puts out quality sets of miniatures at a good value. We’ve backed their previous Wizards Apprentice, Halfling, and Gnome Kickstarters. This one is for a cult of squid-faces. It includes normal squid-faced villagers, as well as powerful squid-faced mages.

This is a pretty cool set of files for 3D Printers to quickly build out small-scale city maps for their campaigns. The STLs are delivered as tiles that can be grouped together or printed separately to allow for modular city-building. It’s a neat concept, but for someone with a lot more room than I have!

Board Games

This is the first of a new model of Kickstarter Campaigns from French creator Monolith, best known for their mega-successful Batman and Conan board games. In this model, they are running very short 10 day campaigns with fixed quantity of product for each region, a short delivery time (January of next year), and no stretch goals. It seems to be working on this campaign, but it’s hard to say 100% this is effective since Claustrophobia (7.6 BGG) is a very popular 2-player dungeon crawler that’s been out of print for a few years. This campaign has all-new (but not pre-painted) minis and merges a ton of new content with the old content from the base game and expansions.

This is the latest Button Shy 18-card wallet game. In it, you will be dueling against another player to rewrite your past to fix mistakes. The twisty-nature of being able to play your opponent’s cards (the side that is facing you) makes the game feel like a real time paradox with you overwriting each other’s actions to try to best reset the past.

This is the second try for these guys at KS. It’s a very modest campaign, but the art really caught my eye. This is a card duel game where you’ll be summoning undead to attack your opponent. It looks to play a bit like Magic with a revised mana system. If this sounds interesting, it’s only $19 for the set of 150 cards.

Project ELITE (7.74 BGG) was my favorite game of 2016. It’s a real-time strategy game where you’re rapidly rolling dice to defeat quickly-advancing alien hordes. It’s a fantastic game that can make you break out in a sweat under the pressure of not letting down your team.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of drama with the company tasked with creating the miniatures for Project: ELITE, and it was never printed beyond the first Kickstarter. So it became a grail game. Luckily CMON bought the license and is producing a massive high-production version of the game.

This Kickstarter mostly introduces new miniatures, the gameplay in the core game looks identical except for the new Heroes (which look compatible with the old heroes from the original.)

The All-In on this game is a bit bonkers with marble dice, two expansions, and even a Zombicide crossover.

This is a quick 2-player game designed by Keith Matejka (designer of Roll Player.) You’ll either be playing a clan of foxes or an ancient guardian. The game itself is asymmetrical combat where the weaker foxes must use work together and smartly to try to take down the gigantic guardians. Hard to say exactly how it will play but this is definitely one I had to go in on since Roll Player is one of my favorite games.

Far Away is a weird game where you’ll be attempting survive loneliness by bonding with your play partner to accomplish tasks on foreign planets. Definitely a unique theme, and they’ve just hit the goal, so it will be made.

Wow, if you really must get all the “must-have” games this week, it would be quite expensive. Another big FOMO-inspiring game is this expansion to the very popular Spirit Island (8.4 BGG, #26 All-Time). Like Claustrophobia, this game will never be released at retail, so if you want it, you’ll need to get it on Kickstarter.

The expansion includes eight new spirits as well as a new “Bad Lands” mechanic which allows you to make land inhospitable to attempt to counter an overwhelming force of spreading settlers.

There’s something about miniature buildings that just grabs me. Miniature buildings on a game board even more so. Maybe it was lots of Monopoly when I was younger. At first, Chartered looks like another boring Euro with a Dutchman on the cover. But wait! Look closely and you’ll see there are some beautiful board buildings in the background. Indeed, the building miniatures are very nice, and somehow the game is still priced reasonably at 39 euros.

It looks like a good Euro, but I find it difficult to judge these games until I’ve actually given them a try. This one is definitely a standout because of the components.

This is a different kind of zombie game, and a different kind of racing game. A horde of zombies pushes towards you while you and your friends attempt to sprint away and get to safety before getting overrun. As the horde runs over more zombies, it picks up speed or activates special abilities. It’s a bit disappointing to see the same old Left 4 Dead/Zombicide zombie archetypes here, but the game does look like some fun.

Barrage is a heavy euro game from designer Simone Luciani who is known for Grand Austria Hotel and Council of 4 (which just got a re-release from CMON this year.) This is a worker placement game where you are building science-fiction hydro-electric plants. The Kickstarter is doing great business, having raised over $300,000.

Miscellaneous

Atripia Games (makers of the aforementioned Project Elite) got robbed of their til at Essen and lost all of the money they had made at their show. They are a small games company, so the loss was devastating. This Kickstarter allows you to pitch in $10 for promos for their more popular games and help them recover from the loss.

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*None of the campaigns mentioned here are sponsored or influenced via payment, prize or other means. If we know or have a connection to someone running the campaign, we will mention it in the campaign notes. If there is a campaign you think should be mentioned here, please e-mail us and tell us what makes it special and we'll review!